She’d heard rave reviews from her friends with iPhones about Prisma, a new iOS app for image editing. So when she heard Prisma would soon be released for Android, she logged in to the Google Play Store to see if it was there yet.

To her surprise, she found one that looked just like what her friends were describing. Delighted, she downloaded and started using it. Meanwhile, the app—a fake—was busy installing a Trojan horse on her phone.

When she got to work the next day, she logged her phone into the company network as usual. The malware jumped from her phone to the network. Yet no one knew. Not yet, but that was about to change…

Now, this isn’t necessarily a true story (at least, not one we’ve heard of—yet…), but it absolutely could have been. And similar situations are unfolding as you read this. Yes, possibly even at your company…

Fake apps exploded onto iTunes and Google Play last November, just in time for holiday shopping. Apple “cleaned up” iTunes in an effort to quell users’ concerns, but hackers still find workarounds. Unfortunately, these fake apps pose a real threat to the security of your network. Especially if your company has anything but the strictest BYOD (bring your own device) policies in place. And the more your network’s users socialize and shop on their smartphones, the greater the risk of a damaging breach on your network.

Fake apps look just like real apps. They masquerade as apps from legitimate merchants of all stripes, from retail chains like Dollar Tree and Footlocker, to luxury purveyors such as Jimmy Choo and Christian Dior. Some of the more malicious apps give criminals access to confidential information on the victim’s device. Worse yet, they may install a Trojan horse on that device that can infect your company’s network next time the user logs in.

By now, you have probably heard that sites including Twitter, Spotify, and Amazon (to name a few) experienced outages a couple of weeks ago in what appears to have been a DDoS attack. Dyn, which manages website domains and routes internet traffic, experienced two distributed denial of service attacks on its DNS servers, according to CNN Money. Services were restored, however, Dyn was again monitoring an attack against its DNS server hours later. "We have begun monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed (Domain Name System) infrastructure. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue," Dyn said on its website at 11:52 a.m. ET., Friday, October 21st.

So, what exactly is a DDoS attack and how can your company avoid such an attack?

Let us talk about cloud computing for San Antonio businesses. Particularly, those that are looking to stay ahead of the technology curve. But before we jump into that, take a minute to think of the classic TV repair shop. If you're in your mid-twenties or older, you likely have quite a few memories of TV repair shops, since they used to be quite popular. Nowadays, less and less people have their tech fixed after it's been broken -- so these TV repair shops, like many others, have long since fallen out of fashion.

The world is a big, strange place, but a constant that's never changed is change itself. Change is good -- like IT support in San Antonio changed IT forever. Change pervades everything in our society, and it's especially present in San Antonio. This means that if you own a business, you have two choices: you can accept the importance of change and use it to your advantage, or you can stubbornly refuse it and be lost to history like the countless people before you who refused change.

Internet downtime is inevitable for most companies with on-premise systems. Yet it's possible to have near zero downtime if you choose an experienced cloud provider that emphasizes security. A major downside to the cloud, however, is that loss of the Internet means you are disconnected from network and communication with customers. Here are items to be aware of in your search for IT support in San Antonio.

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Susan loved editing photos on her Android phone.
She’d heard rave reviews from her friends with iPhones about Prisma, a new iOS app for image editing. So when she heard Prisma would soon be released for Android, she logged in to the ...